...one of the options being considered for replacing kickoffs entails giving the ball to the team that would have been kicking off at its own 30, automatically facing a fourth down and 15 yards to go. The team can then choose to punt or go for it, via fake punt or otherwise.

In other words, the kickoff would be replaced with the punt, and the onside kick would be replaced with a fourth-down conversion...

It is...interesting. I'd honestly make it even further than "4th and 15" though. It needs to be about as unlikely to succeed as regular onside kicks are now. I'd make it "4th and 20" and force them to get past midfield on one try.

Man does that give such an advantage to any team with a Manning Rodgers or Brady. The chances of them converting on that play if they had to get the ball back in the 4th is so much higher than the on sides kick. Personally as long as my team has Brady I'd be more than happy with this rule but as a fan of football and this seems to be the case with most of these rule changes, its ******* stupid.

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Originally Posted by WMD

Jesse realizing Walt was Santa Claus could really shake things up.

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Originally Posted by gpngc

I don't know how old you are, but if you can get to 24/25 without getting arrested or killed, you've done well for yourself lol.

It is...interesting. I'd honestly make it even further than "4th and 15" though. It needs to be about as unlikely to succeed as regular onside kicks are now. I'd make it "4th and 20" and force them to get past midfield on one try.

So...thoughts?

Hate it. Onside kicks are really difficult to get done for a reason. It involves flawless execution and so many things can go wrong during the attempt. 4th and 15 is a chipshot for a guy like Roethlisburger.

"Kick-offs should be like this: a table is placed on the 50 yard line with a pot of tea and cups & saucers. The teams each team picks a player from the other side to see who can drink the most tea the fastest. Then the winning team gets the ball at the 50."

Being on the Hands team sucks against onside kicks though. Roughly 100% of the time it ends up with somebody spearing you in the back. Especially when the guys who are supposed to form the wall to protect you decide that they're just going to try and catch the ball instead of doing what they're supposed to do.

God playing on kickoff return sucks. Playing on the Kickoff team is the most fun thing to do in football though.

It's not the worst idea they have come up with but there are a few holes in it

For example, can the punter directionally kick it out of bounds. It's a penalty if the kick off goes out of bounds, but what happens in this situation?

It's also going to pretty much guarantee good field position for the offense. Seldom do punters kick the ball 70 yards so you pretty much eliminate touchbacks. Even to kick the ball 55/60 yards you are pretty much always going to out kick the coverage. I understand wanting to do away with kickoff returns because they present a high risk of injury, but this almost employs more chance of a return.

Also, what happens if the returning team goes all out for the block and someone roughs the kicker. Do the kicking team get an automatic first down or do they just kick from the 45?

Yeah ok, then if Im the DC I'm just laying out the offenses wrs every time, Ty Law style. You just can't do this I'm sorry. Way too unfair, and I really hope teams dont vote for this, I would be so irritated as a football fan.

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Originally Posted by WMD

Jesse realizing Walt was Santa Claus could really shake things up.

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Originally Posted by gpngc

I don't know how old you are, but if you can get to 24/25 without getting arrested or killed, you've done well for yourself lol.

If they want to solve the concussion problem in the NFL, they need to go back to leather helmets, defensive players aren't going to lead and try to tackle with their heads with a leather helmet on unless they want to be carried off as well.

Yeah ok, then if Im the DC I'm just laying out the offenses wrs every time, Ty Law style. You just can't do this I'm sorry. Way too unfair, and I really hope teams dont vote for this, I would be so irritated as a football fan.

I miss "Ty Law style." Marvin Harrison still probably has nightmares.

Anyway, could formations affect this perhaps? For example, in college and in high school, there are formation specific rules. One such rule is that a holder for for a FG attempt isn't rule down by contact by having his knee on the ground.

Maybe it could be 4th and 15 if the kicking team lines up in a punt formation with their standard punter in the game. Then it becomes 4th and 30 if the team lines up in a regular offense with relaxed contact rules for the defense? Converting a 4th and 30 with the defense more free would be about as unlikely as recovering an onsides kick nowadays.

If they want to solve the concussion problem in the NFL, they need to go back to leather helmets, defensive players aren't going to lead and try to tackle with their heads with a leather helmet on unless they want to be carried off as well.

I like the idea of a grass roots campaign of removing pads from all levels of football before high school. Teach kids how to tackle properly from a young age and that will help.

Right now in the professional game I don't see any quick fix. Guys have been tackling like this their whole lives and aren't going to change

This sounds like some school yard football ****, not professional football. Man, I hope Goodell is the person involved in the prostitution ring so we can get rid of his ass.

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Originally Posted by SolidGold

Bortlezzzzzzz

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Originally Posted by Monomach

Brilliant letting one of Scott Pioli's henchmen have his own team to ruin. One of the premier GM jobs in the NFL and it gets handed to a stupid **** who makes three facepalm moves for every good one. Awesome. Just like handing a new Mercedes to a 16 year old girl who's already been in three wrecks.

I like the idea of a grass roots campaign of removing pads from all levels of football before high school. Teach kids how to tackle properly from a young age and that will help.

Right now in the professional game I don't see any quick fix. Guys have been tackling like this their whole lives and aren't going to change

Believe me, after a few defensive players are carried off trying to lead with their heads, with leather helmets, you would be surprised how quickly they would adjust to a new tackling method, at least in my opinion.

Cool story. I can't wait until the rules change to do all Kickoffs like the XFL:

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There is no coin toss to determine which team will get the ball first.

Instead of the coin toss, the action in the XFL will start before the game even kicks off. Player from each team will line up on the 35-yard line. The referee will blow the whistle and each player will dash to the 50-yard line where a ball will be placed. The team that recovers the ball has the choice to kick or receive.

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Originally Posted by Scott Wright

I guarantee that if someone picks Cam Newton in the Top 5 they will regret it.

League is becoming a joke and pretty much laughable. Goodell is looking for entertainment and high scoring contests. He doesn't care. If the amount of high scoring games are down he needs to find a way to boost the.

It's not a new idea, Schiano thought of that idea directly after Erik Legrand's incident. Here's an article about it with some statisticals breakdown. Of course, since Schiano was at Rutgers when he proposed the idea, the author of the article uses NCAA stats, so some stats were taken from the NCAA. It does say, though, that ine the NFL, in 2010, teams "converted" an onside kick 25% of the attempts versus 18% for the average 4th and 15 conversion.

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An interesting article by Steve Politi came out this morning on an idea by Rutgers coach Greg Schiano on a way to eliminate kickoffs in football. As most of you will remember, Rutgers player Eric LeGrand was paralyzed last year on a kickoff in a game against Army at New Meadowlands field, prompting Schiano to have a strong opinion on kickoffs. As evidenced by our Adam Taliaferro entry into the ESPN Fanwiches contest, I feel strongly about spinal cord injuries as well and am all for listening to ideas on how to reduce the risk in football. At the same time, I am a traditionalist and would hate to see the game severely altered, so I wanted to do a statistical breakdown of coach Schiano’s idea and see what might be the outcome of the Schiano plan versus the current kickoff system.
As outlined in the article by Politi, the Schiano plan calls for the ball to be placed on the 30 yard line in a 4th and 15 situation for the team that just scored. Then the team that just scored has two options. The first option would replace your normal kickoff with a punt play. The other option would replace the onside kick, and would allow the team to attempt a conversion of the 4th and 15 for a first down. If the conversion is successful, the team gets to keep possession, otherwise the defensive team would take over where the play was whistled dead.
It is an interesting concept, but lets get to the stats and see what kind of impact such a plan would have on starting field position. Thankfully, the site cfbstats.com exists, making most of the statistical data I needed for a quick comparison relatively easy to find. I was able to do some quick manipulation in Excel and get what I wanted in less than 30 minutes.
ASSUMPTIONS NOTE: I know that the stats aren’t perfect in accounting for all possibilities, but I think the following is a fair look at the plan as best we can so here are the assumptions that I had to make.
Not every kickoff from the 2010 stats occurred from the 30 yard line due to penalties and safeties, but the same would be true under the Schiano plan, so you have to assume that such occurrences would happen at the same rate, so I just assumed that every kickoff came from the 30 yard line. There were 8,340 kickoffs in FBS in 2010 and only 209 went out of bounds, resulting in a starting position of the 40 yard line, so I am convinced that we can basically ignore this situation, as it would move the average starting yard line by less than .25 of a yard.
Another is that sometimes punts are purposfully shortened in an effort the pin the opponent deep in their own end, so we will add 3 yards to the average punt to account for this.
2010 Kickoffs:

In 2010, the ball was kicked off from the 30 yard line, meaning that a kickoff that resulted in a touch-back went at least 70 yards.
Average Kickoff Length: 62.82 yards
Average Kickoff Return: 21.86 yards
So, 70-62.82 means that the average kickoff was fielded at the 7.18 yard line and then was returned 21.86 yards.
Thus, the average starting field position from kickoffs was the 29.04 yard line*.
2010 Punts:

Average Punt Length: 40.92 yards
Average Punt Return: 8.92 yards
So, if the average punt went 40.92 yards and was returned 8.92 yards, the net punt was 32 yards.
The Schiano Plan:

Replacing kickoffs with punts:

The first, and main, portion of the plan calls for replacing the standard kickoff with a punt. Looking at our data, if the punts come from the same 30 yard line as the kickoffs, and using the average punt length from the 2010 season, then that would give us an average starting position of the 38 yard line using the punt plan. If we add in our extra 3 yards** then the average starting position would be the 35 yard line. When we compare that to the average starting position of the 29.04 yard line for kickoffs, then if seems like the average starting position would favor the offense by basically 6 yards.
Replacing the onside kick with a 4th and 15 attempt:

This is the area where stats were very hard to come by, so I used the stats given in the Politi article. He used stats from the site advancednflstats.com showing that the average 4th & 15 conversion rate in the NFL was around 18% in 2010 and the average onside kick conversion rate was 25% . We will use this number for looking at the Schiano plan even though they are NFL stats just because the college stats just don’t seem to exist.
There were 124 onside kick attempts in FBS in 2010, basically an average of just 1 attempt per team for the entire year. So, if they were successful at 25%, then 31 attempts were converted. If you take the same number of attempts at 18% for 4th and 15, then just 22 onside attempts would be converted.
I am not sure that this changes the game a whole lot, but lets not forget that for this year, the kickoff was moved up the the 35 yard line, meaning that this distance then becomes move like 11 yards. Sure, this could be offset by moving the position of the punt to the 35 as well, but then I think it becomes more enticing for people like Lane Kiffin to always go for the 4th and 15 conversion because even a play that falls just short puts your opponent right around midfield. The next big step would be for someone to do an injury study to prove that a punt play has a substantial reduction in injuries versus a traditional kickoff. If that happens and the stats prove it would be safer, I certainly feel that the Schiano plan will bring dialog, which is the first step toward change. I think the stats could be argued either way and while I hate to see the kickoff disappear, I think it is a plan that if given some minor tweaking could be backed by a number of coaches, especially in the name of safety. After all, no one wants to see another incident like what happened to Eric LeGrand and countless others before him.
*see assumption #1
**see assumption #2